Paul stopped the one-way conversations (via opinions added to Comments pages) and started interacting with key professionals in his field on a number of niche channels, groups on LinkedIn and more.

John O’Connor, from TheLadders.com, recently wrote about helping an executive job seeker, “Paul,” who was having trouble making sense of the online social networks he thought were supposed to support his job search.

At the start, Paul had no less than 50 pages of contacts, resume material and logs from his multi-month job search online and offline.

The following eight steps helped Paul replace his unfocused activity and put his online social networking into its proper place.

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10 Steps to Tech EmploymentThere was once a perception that working for the nation's largest companies equaled career stability. Not anymore.